by Alan Drew
The tables overflowed with mezeler, but there was more in the refrigerator, keeping fresh out of the heat. On one table, rice and pine nuts spilled out of stuffed peppers, dolmalar sat stacked on tea saucers like a pyramid of grape-leaf cigars, Circassian chicken floated in walnut sauce and pools of olive oil. On a wobbly card table sat fava and green-bean salad, spinach in yogurt sauce, and numerous other plates filled with vegetables and fruit and warm loaves of bread. Minced lamb baked in the oven, and cubed mutton with carrots, onions, and broth stewed in pastry bowls. There were eggplants stuffed with ground beef and nuts and rice and cinnamon, meatballs with hot peppers, börek layered with goat’s-milk cheese and spinach, and even little bowls of warmed almonds and hazelnuts. Sinan couldn’t help counting the lira in his head.
People broke away from the dancing, filled their plates, and ate without missing a note of the singing. Ahmet, true to form, stuffed his mouth with a dolma while spinning in the center of the room with the rest of the dancers, and Sinan wondered if he had had more to drink before coming to the party. There were small cups of Rize tea, many of them, and Nilüfer had to keep the tea brewing constantly. rem made coffee the traditional way, bringing it to a boil three times before adding the sugar. Mehmet Türkolu read people’s fortunes in turned-over coffee cups, analyzing the bumps and smears of coffee grounds in the little white saucers. “You will marry young and have six boys,” he told a girl who lived down the street. The girl blushed. “You will have to choose between three beautiful girls,” he told her brother, a boy of only seven. The boy stuck out his tongue at the prospect. Mehmet laughed out loud and reached across the table to hug him to his chest.
The Americans arrived late. After descending the stairs from their apartment, they stood in the open doorway looking lost. Sinan waited a while before greeting them, hoping they might give up and leave, but people started gossiping about them—he was a director at one of the expensive private missionary schools in stanbul, they were from California and knew famous actors personally, they only summered in Gölcük and owned a fancy apartment in the rich stanbul neighborhood of Nianta—and etiquette finally forced Sinan to be gracious.
The wife handed Sinan a red package wrapped with a white bow.
“Just something little,” she said. Her eyes were green, and when she smiled they became very small, as though she were squinting in the sun.
“Thank you,” he said. “Please come in.”
If his father knew he was letting Americans into his home! Americans who helped the Turkish government destroy Kurdish villages! Why did he let Nilüfer talk him into these things?
“Can I take your coats?” he heard rem say before he saw her standing next to him.
The American boy smiled. It was terribly hot, and they weren’t wearing any coats.
rem laughed, her forehead growing red.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sinan said quietly.
“I mean, tea.” She glanced at him and then smiled to the guests. “Can I get you some tea?”
“Yes,” the woman said, taking rem’s hand. “Yes, darling, that would be wonderful.”
The party continued, and soon Sinan forgot about the Americans. His son watched from the raised bed, looking upon the scene as though he could not be bothered with such a spectacle. Sinan was happy, but it was time for the sünnetci to arrive, and he was nervous for smail. Would he cry out with the pain? Would the sünnetci slip with the knife and permanently ruin his child It did happen, although very rarely. There was a story about one boy bleeding to death in his sleep, the parents waking the next morning to find him cold and white as stone in his circumcision bed.
The sünnetci arrived, carrying a black bag in his hands. He stood in the doorway, took off his shoes, and waited to be invited in. When the dancers saw him, they stopped, and stood fixing their untucked clothes and ruffled hair. Men snuffed out their cigarettes and women took last sips of tea. Ahmet turned down the music and Sinan welcomed the man.
“Ho geldiniz, efendim,” he said, and kissed the man on each cheek.
“Ho bulduk.”
He was an old man, dressed in black, his cheeks gaunt and sunken, his teeth yellow where the enamel had been stripped from a lifetime of tea drinking. He pulled at his thin white beard with his left hand as he nodded hello to the guests.
From his bag he produced a white sheet, a bottle of antiseptic, a few cotton balls, a bottle of anesthetic, and a battery-powered knife. Ahmet took smail’s arm in his hand, and whispered something in his ear. Ahmet was the kirve, and from this day forward would be like a second father to the boy. If something terrible happened and Sinan should die, Ahmet would raise smail as though the boy were his own. Sinan couldn’t hear what Ahmet said, but in his own mind he was saying to his son, “It will hurt, but it will pass, it will hurt, but it will pass.”
The women stood on the other side of the room, away from the men who gathered around the bed. Mehmet and Yigit Akay held the sheet in the air like a screen for a karagöz puppet show so that the operation was hidden from the rest of the guests.
Sinan stood away, as the father should, but watched his son’s face during the operation. smail held his jaw tight and looked at the ceiling. The sound of the knife made Sinan’s stomach turn. He and the rest of the men said, “Allahu Akbar.” smail’s face turned white and his lips quivered and his eyes filled with water, but he didn’t let out a sound, and the water did not spill down his cheeks.
The sünnetci dressed the wound and said, “May it pass quickly.” smail lay there staring up at the ceiling, his face still pale, as ashen as if flour had been sifted over his skin.
Chapter 6
SHE WAS ACTING LIKE A FOOL. “CAN I TAKE YOUR COATS?”! Aptal! It was burning hot out! rem spilled a plate of rice in the potted fern and poured tea into Mehmet Bey’s coffee, and she was so scared, so entirely out of breath with panic, that she couldn’t even bring herself to go over to where Dylan and his parents sat. She thought a month of secret meetings could be read in her face, and even though she could see that they were out of tea and that they needed dessert, she let them wait until her mother made it to that side of the room.
“Don’t forget about the Americans,” her mother scolded.
“They make me nervous,” she said, relieved to reveal part of the truth.
“Oh, you sound like your father!” Her mother left the kitchen bearing yet another pot of tea.
When the time had come for the circumcision, rem had been genuinely scared for her brother. He was babied by her parents and allowed to do whatever he wanted, but she had held him as an infant and fed him at night when her mother was exhausted and he was crying. She listened to him in the darkness of early morning when he spoke funny gibberish in his sleep. So when she heard the knife, she held her breath until it was done, and she forgot, at least momentarily, about the American boy, Dylan.
Afterward, though, her mother and father went to smail and held his hand and kissed his cheeks, and she was left alone to pick up the dishes. She delivered a stack of plates and cups to the kitchen and returned to the living room for another stack. Everyone crowded around smail now—his white bed and clothes shining in the lamplight—and showered him with tinsel.
For her there had been no big party, no money or fancy clothes. She simply woke up one morning two years ago with blood on her legs and stains on the sheets. When she told her mother, her mother quietly stripped the bed so as not to wake the still-sleeping smail, wadded up the sheets, and stuffed them at the bottom of the clothes hamper.
“You surprised me,” she said. “So early.”
She had whisked rem into the washroom and showed her what to do to contain the bleeding while her father waited outside the door, knocking occasionally, and complaining about being late to the bakkal.
“rem. You’re a woman,” her mother had said, smiling, whispering as though it were a conspiracy. “You must stay away from the boys now.”
She had gone to bed a child and awoken a woma
n, and she had had to stand there in the locked bathroom—the glaring white light shining down, the pad bunched uncomfortably between her legs—and listen to her mother deliver new rules in hushed tones that made her feel ashamed.
And for a week afterward her father hadn’t said more than three words to her, and that was only after she finally resorted to sitting on his lap one night after dinner. “No, please, rem,” he said, brushing her off his lap. It was like she was suddenly contagious.
Now she dropped a stack of dessert trays in the sink, the shredded remnants of baklava sliding off into the dirty water. She returned to the living room and pictures were being taken: her father with his arm around smail, smiling as though the boy had just been born, smiling in a way she rarely saw anymore. She wanted that smile showered upon her.
She balanced dirty teacups in her arms and went to the kitchen and dropped those in the sink, hoping they would break, wishing she wouldn’t have to wash them, wanting everyone to stop smiling and notice her for once, even if it meant being yelled at. She dipped her hand in the water and washed the rim of a teacup with the sponge while she listened to the laughter in the other room.
After her father had gone to the bakkal that morning, her mother had sat her down in this kitchen, pinned back her hair, and wrapped it away in a scarf. She wasn’t trying to hurt her, rem knew that, but she scraped her scalp with the pins, and pulled her hair back so tightly her eyelids turned up at the corners. She remembered the smile on her mother’s face—not quite happy, but satisfied in some strange way. When she was done, her mother kissed her and held her and rem watched the morning light filter through the dirty plastic skylight. A pot of burning rice steamed on the stove.
And she realized now—as she scraped the gooey cake crumbs of “ladies’ navels” into the trash—that she had spent more time since that day in the gray light of this kitchen than she had outside in the sun.
She slapped the plate against the trash can to loosen the pastry from the globs of honey and thought about taking each and every one of the tea saucers and smashing them to the floor.
But then Dylan arrived, carrying an armful of plates.
“Circumcision and food,” he said, setting the plates on the counter. “You Turks have got interesting ways of having fun.”
“It’s not supposed to be fun,” she said, scraping harder at the plates.
“Joke,” he said. “A joke?”
She stopped, blew air through her teeth, and leaned a fist on her hip.
“They really make you work, huh?” he said. “I’ll help.”
“No. You don’t have to.”
“It’s too much for one person.”
He took the first plate off the top of the stack, scooted closer to her, and ran it under the hot water. She could smell his cologne—not cologne exactly, not like the sharp scents the Turkish boys wore, but something that smelled like sweet burning, an oil maybe. She watched his hands circle the rim of the plate, looked at the back of his neck, admired the place where his earlobe met the curve of his jaw. Something about his posture, the way he concentrated on the washing, perhaps, made him seem so much older than she, though they were only two years apart. There was nothing separating them now, no glass, no metal, no cement, yet now she almost wished there were.
She left him there and returned to the living room. She wanted to get some air. Her mother and father were still sitting beside smail, and she thought her brother looked very tired, as though all he wanted was for them all to go away and let him sleep. She stacked as many plates in her arms as possible, all the way up to her chin, and returned to the kitchen.
Dylan was still there, working now on a stack of utensils. She wanted him to stay and she wanted him to leave. She wanted him to be a man and stop washing the dishes, but she loved him for the help.
She placed the new stack of plates beside him.
“Slave driver,” he said.
She didn’t get the joke, but she smiled and laughed timidly just to make him happy.
He washed and she dried and she wondered if this was what it was like to be married to an American man. She wasn’t sure she liked it. What did a woman get in this world if she didn’t get the kitchen? But his company electrified her and she leaned in a little more and felt the steam from the sink touching her face and her heart started jumping all around and she had a difficult time getting her breath and suddenly his hand was on hers and she dropped the plate in the water.
“No,” she said, pulling away.
They both looked toward the doorway to see if anyone was coming.
He smiled and moved closer again, pressing her against the wall of the kitchen, taking both of her wet hands in his.
“No,” she said again, throwing away his hands and squirming free. She leaned against the doorway and adjusted her blouse and straightened her skirt. “Not in this house.”
Chapter 7
SINAN STARTLED AWAKE FROM A DREAM IN WHICH HIS FATHER scolded him for abandoning their village. “My grandson will never know Yeilli, his home,” his father had said in the dream, his black eyes staring holes into Sinan. The house behind his father was on fire and it was very hot and Sinan wanted to tell him this but he couldn’t make his mouth work.
The clock next to the bed said 2:45. He kissed Nilüfer on the cheek before getting up in the dark and walking into the front room.
In the glow from the streetlights, he saw smail there sleeping. A slight breeze blew through the open window, and the few strands of tinsel still stuck in his son’s hair sparkled in the wind. He stood next to the bed and listened to the steady rise and fall of the boy’s breath. He thought about closing the window—something about the wind touching his son’s sleeping face disturbed him—but it was too hot and he decided to leave it open. As he pulled the remaining strands of tinsel from his son’s hair, smail stirred and swatted at the annoyance. His hand stuck there next to his ear, a loose fist with the palm open to the sky. There was an air of the sleeping infant in the pose, and it seemed to Sinan that only days before he had held the baby smail in his arms, the small, pudgy body, the toothless gums of his mouth, that fresh powdery smell of his skin.
He climbed the staircase to the roof of the apartment building, and his left foot, deformed since birth, and sore from the day’s walking in stanbul, throbbed with each step. It looked like Berker Bey, the owner of the apartment, was going to build another level—there was exposed rebar, bags of cement, and loosely stacked cinder blocks—but Sinan knew that he was really just avoiding paying taxes; the government couldn’t assess taxes until construction was finished. Life was full of these little immoralities.
From the rooftop he could see over the Americans’ terrace, past the other apartment rooftops and their cluttered satellite dishes, and out over the Gulf of zmit toward the forested hillsides across the water. He stood on the edge of the roof, his shins pressing against the raised edge, and was surprised to see the American wife below him, sitting alone on a wicker chair. Her back was to him, her face turned toward the black water. She was still except for the rise and fall of her right hand, which held a lit cigarette.
For some reason he felt sorry for her, this woman he knew nothing about. She seemed the picture of loneliness at that moment—her stillness in the dark, the curve of her thick, motherly back, her bare white legs dully shining in the light of the waterfront. A lot of things were said about these Americans, but if they were so rich, he wondered, why didn’t they have their summer home in Yalova with all the other rich people? Gölcük, though by the sea, was a poor town, a working-man’s town. If they were so rich, why did the wife seem so sad? Maybe he should have been kinder to them at the party. He thought briefly about breaking her silence with a “Good evening,” but decided against it and retreated out of sight to sit on a plastic chair on the rooftop.
There he took off his left shoe and rubbed the inflamed stump that should have been a foot. He would have to run the register at the grocery for a few days so he could stay
off the foot until the swelling went down.
He often sat on the roof when he couldn’t sleep. Since Öcalan had been caught by the government and the civil war in the South seemed over, his father had been visiting him more often in his dreams. His father would have been devastated to hear that the Turks had captured the PKK leader. Without Apo, as Öcalan was called by his father and all separatist-leaning Kurds, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was effectively dead, and so was the movement to carve a Kurdistan out of a corner of Turkey. No one else could kill the Turkish paramilitaries the way Apo did; no one else could inspire such fear in the government buildings in Ankara.
Perhaps it was safe to return home to Yeilli, but it was difficult to imagine it so. He touched the shard of bullet hanging from a chain around his neck—it was all he had left of his father, God bless him. He remembered the night his father was killed, the popping of the M-16 rifle shots, the screaming, the men and boys gathered for the new-year celebration diving away from the bonfires. His father had sent him home when the paramilitary jeeps arrived, and he was already past Emre Bey’s butcher shop when his father’s friends and the other men began yelling Long live Kurdistan, or else he might have been killed, too.
He felt a sting of guilt about having the Americans in his home. If his father had been here tonight, he wouldn’t have stepped into the apartment with them there. “The Americans let the Turks do this to us,” he would have said. “And now you feed them, invite them to your son’s most important day?” He had dishonored his father’s memory, and he would have to suffer the pangs of remorse for giving in to his wife’s hospitality.
He watched the streak of black water beyond the rooftops, and the city lights strewn around the bay like a necklace. The tea-black sky floated above him, punctured with only three stars, just three tiny pinpricks. At night in the village there were more stars than night sky, more worlds out there staring back than there were people in the whole of this city, probably more than there were people in all of the world’s cities. He wanted to return to Yeilli, he wanted his children to grow up in the shadow of the mountains, but where would he get the money for the trip? How could he leave the business? How would he make a living there? He wanted to explain this to his father, tell him that it was best to stay here, for his children. There was nothing in the South—no jobs, no schools, no future. But even as he built his argument in his head, his father’s angry face appeared, and doubt clouded his logic.